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New Chapbook from Sarah Freligh

Congratulations to Sarah Freligh, current Ashland University MFA student, whose chapbook of poems won the Editor's Choice award in the Accents 2012 Poetry Chapbook Contest!
A Brief Natural History of an American Girl
by Sarah Freligh

"In A Brief Natural History of an American Girl, Sarah Freligh pulls you into the car of a 1950's girlhood and you stay, compelled by the journey through sexual awakening and into womanhood. It's a difficult story. The narrator loses a lot—she gives kisses to the boss at Donut Delite, her virginity to a boy in a cornfield, her body to men she knows, or doesn't. She gives away a baby. She buries her mother. And hope, how 'easy to give her away.' And yet not quite. Through the accumulation of experience, through the ability to look clearly and name what she sees, Freligh insists on possibility. The poems draw our attention, then elicit a shiver of recognition. This is what one girlhood looks like; this is what human experience looks like. The journey is not over, she reminds us. You 'are not there yet.' - Wendy Mnookin, Author of The Moon Makes Its Own Plea.

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